Plato as the post-1960s student-essay

Local Affairs / Affaires Locales

Plato as the post-1960s student:
Rancourt's only chance?

By: Denis G. Rancourt

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MY CASE — which is best documented at
http://academicfreedom.ca — leaves few
conscious students indifferent. Students
either vehemently want me to go away or care about
my case and side with me against the administration.
Both reactions are based on an understanding of the
facts: students who oppose me understand that I
threaten their comfort as they aspire to integrate into
the system; students who side with me understand
that I fight with them against our common oppres-
sor — institutional hierarchy, administrative control of
our lives, and undemocratic rule.

I am gambling that a meaningless life of servitude
is not enough for some of us, irrespective of the perks
and brown-nosed social status that come with it. I am
gambling that enough students and citizens want to
be in charge of their lives, want to own their personal
influence on the community and society, and want
a full political dimension outside of management
by manufactured representation. I am gambling my
profession on it.

A meaningless life of servitude was not enough on
campuses in the 1960s. In those days, students fought
and won. Tliey repealed in loco parentis. They defeated
trespass laws to win freedom of spcccli. Tliey won
representatives on every committee and council up to
and including the Senate and Board. In the 1960s
students kicked ass because they wanted to be alive
rather than be treated like barn animals watching
PowerPoint presentations. YouTube "Mario Savio" to
open a small window into what I mean: "Beneath the
cobblestones there is the beach" meant something.

Tlien came the long sleep as increasingly globalized
and corporatized universities clawed back the gains
with codes of conduct, ever increasing tests and
deadlines, ever increasing tuition fees, professors
hired for their corporate ties, politician presidents,
etc. And, now, trespass to property is back and used
against student demonstrators across the country —
UBC, U ofT, York, Ottawa...

Now the administration tells the SFUO who
the student reps on committees can and cannot be,
and the SFUO lies down and dies because it does
not stand for anything. Student unions are now
federations and associations that manage services and
educational campaigns rather than being the cutting
edges of student power that they could be. SFUO

executives could start with one simple rule: "No
more secret meetings with the administration behind
closed doors. Period." Everything open, recorded, and
transparent.

On the professorial side, it is a measure of the state
of affairs and of the present state of academic freedom,
when a university administration judges that it can fire
a full and tenured dissident professor using a pretext
as bold as high grades in one course. My case is one
that all university administrations are following with
interest: "Can we now cleanse the campus of dissidents
and radicals?" Welcome to Sterile U where all the
answers are in the PowerPoint slides, where discourse is
forbidden, and where that is not in the syllabus.

So-called radical professors who promote radical
thinking are the top-end neutralizers of activist
students. They teach that the pen is mightier than the
sword, and that problems are solved by good ideas,
and other such nonsense that distances the service
intellectuals of tomorrow from anything that would
threaten power. My practice is one of liberation, not
one of constructing mental prisons tor the castrated
priests who will serve hierarchies. I am an anarchist. I
seek to press the pyramid down into a more horizontal
shape, by any means, starting in the classroom.

In the classfoom, I give up my power by giving up the
grade. The only way to precipitate independent thinking
is to give freedom. Students who are preoccupied with
reading my mind or with regurgitating on command
for a grade distance themselves from themselves; from
even the most basic ability to know when they do
not understand something. It is to remove a student's
humanity to reduce him or her to a trained parrot and
to an obedient slave, no matter how "progressive" the
ideas are.

Go to academicfreedom.ca and read the more
than seventy-five letters from former students about
my pedagogical experiments and the impacts on
students' lives. Then contrast these testimonies with
the administration's zeal to fire me. It does not make
any sense — until you recognize that it is not about
education. It is about control, external power, class
privilege, and an emperor who has no clothes.

Like Socrates, I have worked hard for my hemlock.
Plato watched and was silent but Plato had not seen
the 1960s. What part will you play? Start your
education. Reject the syllabus. D

Spring 2009

the political magazine of the students 23